Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2862

Typed letter to Heath at 1502 Montgomery Road, Baltimore 27, Maryland, to Isabel Paterson at RFD 1, Canal Road, Princeton, New Jersey

November 1, 1958

Dear Mr. Heath —

No, I did not receive the book — only the pamphlets. I mean I have not yet received the book. I do as a rule answer letters promptly; when I was working on a newspaper, it seemed the best way to keep even with my work; otherwise I got swamped. And the newspaper work itself has got to be done complete each day.

I must confess beforehand to a reasoned conviction that it is impossible to avoid having government, e. g., a political organization, for a fixed-base production economy. I tell you this now so you may look out for what may seem to you prejudice.

I assume also that either of us may be mistaken. Also I say I have a reasoned conviction, meaning that I hope I am still open to reason if you can show me that I am mistaken. You being an engineer will not, I presume take exception to my strictly negative position (my saying it is impossible); you know that it is possible to know that some things are impossible! (E.g., a “perpetual motion machine” is impossible, at least for human beings to construct.) To me then the problem of government is to devise the form of the organization which will ensure that the individual has sufficient leverage against it to hold it to its proper function of protecting his individual rights. I do not say that is easy to solve; but I should think it must be a problem intrinsically similar to that of a man building and running a motor car — the car certainly has and must have far more physical (mechanical) power than the individual person who runs it, yet he certainly can control it and use it.

 One thing I remember in our brief conversation is that you saw exactly what I meant (because you are an engineer) when I was trying to state why the kind of government which obtains among nomad pastoral tribes is the only possible kind for such a condition, and therefore has never really changed in any known instance throughout history — the laws of mechanics don’t change, and in those conditions the nexus of government cannot change. I was describing rather clumsily what I meant, and you at once gave me the mechanical formula which expresses it — “Pressure cannot be accumulated against a mobile object.” That is exactly the governing law of mechanics in the case of pastoral nomads. Maybe you don’t remember this scrap of conversation; but I do, very clearly; it was of great value to me. — And its converse truth, that pressure can be accumulated against a fixed object, does seem to me to be the primary fact and law from which one must reason to solve the problem of government (or you may be thinking, of having no government) for a fixed-base production economy. Do you see what I mean?

 Evidently you really have read my not too fortunate novels. I guess the wide range of times and places in which the scenes are set came to me as a side-issue of my interest in history /because/ then I was thinking of the problems of society, economics, government, etc. — You’ve got some of them a bit misplaced; my Spanish romance (the best of my three historical novels) was set in the fourteenth century (1370, to be exact), not the eighteenth. Another of three was in Elizabethan England, time of the Armada. The third was a very odd little novel, but nothing to do with Genghis Khan; it was in Thuringia, about the year 40 BC., I think; among the heathen Germans, Druidic. However, it is not surprising if you do not recall these three novels very precisely; I am beginning to forget them myself.

                            (Signed) Isabel Paterson